Saturday, 8 September 2012

Awkward Reverence

Awkward Reverence : the Little World of Philip Larkin

Article written by Philip Harvey for the ANZTLA Newsletter and first published in 2005

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a large round man with a round
bald head and large oblong spectacles. He is about one of the most well-known
English poets of the reign of Elizabeth II, and although not as accomplished as
the most well-known poet under Elizabeth I, will be in the anthologies as long
as English poetry survives. He was a member of a writing circle in the 1950s
called the Movement. Its literary values, agenda even, is put well in a letter
of the time: “For my part I feel we have got the method right – plain language,
absence of posturings, sense of proportion, humour, abandonment of the
dithyrambic ideal – and are waiting for the matter: a fuller and more sensitive
response to life as it appears from day to day, and not only on Mediterranean
holidays financed by the British Council.”1 This has sometimes been called
kitchen sink literature. Philip Larkin’s other job was as a librarian.

Larkin was in personal dispute throughout his life about his
own career choice. He ends one poem with the blunt warning “Get stewed: / Books
are a load of crap.”2 Not a view one would expect from an authoritative
university librarian. Not a good opener for a reference class. When we read the
preceding lines though, we see why such a person could get so cranky. Life
starts well,

When getting my nose in a book

Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes

To know I could still keep cool,

And deal out the old right hook

To dirty dogs twice my size.

But the experiences of life fill him with a disillusion that
literature cannot equal:

Don’t read much now: the dude

Who lets the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap

Who’s yellow and keeps the store,

Seem far too familiar.

This is an elegant reiteration of the proverb, or even
perhaps cliché, that life teaches you everything you need to know, who needs
books: truth is stranger than fiction. This struggle, both with the worth of
literature and with his own public employment, finds expression in many of
Larkin’s perfectly cadenced poems and can, like so much poetry, be sourced to
hidden sufferings. One of the poems most popular with English readers begins,

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the
brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

With its sickening
poison –

Just for paying a few bills!

That’s out of
proportion.

It’s hard to believe that ‘Toads’ 3 was published when
Larkin was 32, with most of his working life still before him. Somehow though
he must have found solutions to “the toad”, or found solace in work, as he
proceeded to have a successful career as University Librarian of the Brynmor
Jones Library at the University of Hull. In a letter later in his life, Larkin
wrote that when he took over responsibility for running the Library in 1955 it
was “a nice little Shetland pony,” which under his guidance had turned into “a
frightful Grand National winner.”4 A steadier, hopeful acclamation of the value
of librarianship can be sensed behind the words of this short poem, ‘New eyes
each year’5, written in the year before his death. It gains added depth when we
know that he died in harness.

New eyes each year

Find old books here,

And new ones, too,

Old eyes renew;

So youth and age

Like ink and page

In this house join,

Minting new coin.

The Australian poet Peter Porter once described himself as
an agnostic Anglican. There are a host of such people and they would make up a
large percentage of what Bishop John Spong calls the Church Alumni Society.
Philip Larkin’s work displays several of the characteristics of an agnostic
Anglican. Like Porter, for example, a favourite pastime was to spend his
holidays visiting English country churches. Once he passed by a church on his
bicycle, commemorated in that famous poem and school exercise, ‘Church Going’.
6 It is worth observing that this is a personal visit and that the whole poem
is missing what most of us would think of as essential to a church, the people
who attend.

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

The poet plays a dichotomous role, as one who questions the
purpose of this church, only then to find reasons of his own that are much more
than “tasteless Common Sense” 7 or sentiment. On the one hand he asks, was it
worth stopping for, only to answer himself

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for …

His feeling about being there moves from uncertainty and
unease (“Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence …”) slowly
toward a reconciliation with his doubts (“But superstition, like belief, must
die…”), before he comes to acknowledge that

…though I’ve no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

What makes him change? “Awkward reverence” holds the clue,
for he learns that such reverence is possible and a reality, even though it has
to be said in a mildly irreverent way – by removing cycle-clips thus, he mimics
the act of bowing or genuflection to the altar familiar within the Catholic
traditions of the church. What changes him, or converts him even? The presence
and silence of the church itself and all of those who have used it, including
the “many dead” who “lie around.” Then too, his own need, his own potential for
acceptance rather than denial,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in …

The poem says much about the ambivalent attitudes so many
English people, not to mention people in general, have toward churches and
church. Doubt, questioning, questing and some sign of hope are described as a
process in the verses of ‘Church Going’.

Another very direct handling of the subject of religion is
the poem ‘Water’ 8:

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

What would you do if you “were called in to construct a
religion”? At first glance Larkin’s assignment seems a puzzling, even eccentric
game. But if we are prepared to take him seriously then first we must
acknowledge that water is the source of all life as we know it. Belief, in fact
certainty, in water is to be affirmed, especially in a country like Australia
where it’s presence has become a matter for restrictions and futures. How can
we have meaning, or begin to make meaning, without water?

Judaism employs water everywhere in its scripture, most
unforgettably in its creation myth at the start of Genesis. And the Christian
religion inherits the understanding of water as maker and life-giver. Indeed,
the sign of water is the definition of a Christian and even though verse three
might even sound comic on first reading, it is a fair description of how
baptism is often performed. ‘Water’ sets us thinking about religion. It also
makes us wonder about the poet. After all, Larkin is setting up a rational
discourse on the subject, while we know from ‘Church Going’ that he would be
quite sceptical about holy wells, river gods, and other aqueous manifestations
of the divine. When, in the final verse, he raises his glass to the east “where
any-angled light would congregate endlessly,” it instantly reminds us of
Larkin’s hard rationalist philosophy. It mocks religious symbolic action while
simultaneously celebrating existence through such action. The poem remains
unsettling, maybe because of the very impersonal nature of the religion
espoused. Another Australian poet, Bruce Beaver, puts it well in his poetic
attack 9 on Larkin and the Movement:

Nothing was ever intended to be

extraordinary. The exceptional automatically

is suspect. Anything that can’t be measured

weighed and completely self-satisfiedly

categorised as useful in a wholly

functional fashion is out. So are you.

For all the celebration of beauty and small pleasures that
we find in his poetry, Philip Larkin himself seems to have been a difficult and
even disagreeable individual. Private correspondence is where we find a person
at their best and worst, unbuttoned if not actually unwashed; Larkin in this
respect is full of the philistine opinions and anti-intellectual attitudes of a
Little Englander. His letters, and his biographies to seem extent, disabuse us
of any romantic image of the poet-librarian.

Each of the thin volumes published in Larkin’s lifetime is
packed with background knowledge, proving Samuel Johnson’s saying, “A man will
turn over half a library to make one book.” 10 Larkin’s output dwindles as he
gets older. Some readers have explained this in terms of his work, that library
commitments made it harder and harder to find time to write and read; we all
know a librarian somewhere who no longer has time to read, they’re so busy with
books. Larkin’s slowing up can be traced to problems in his own life, but there
are also mundane explanations to consider, such as he had nothing more to say,
or that he couldn’t be bothered. As happens so often with artists who are
highly popular in their own lifetime, the demand of the fans far exceeds the
interests or abilities of their idols.

Larkin was largely a social poet, his themes the mistakes
people make, and human fallibility generally. His worldview was formed by the
experience of wartime England and the resulting hard-eyed realism of austerity
England. Samuel Johnson also said that literature helps us better to enjoy
life, or better to endure it, a position that Larkin probably shared to judge
by his passion for it in the Letters. A rounded reader, Larkin identifies “the
priest and the doctor” as prerequisite in his poem ‘Days’. 11 Their presence in
this poem can be interpreted as the reader wishes and some see them as grave
forebodings or impractical interferences in the real business of life. A more
generous interpretation would argue that their mention is quite essential for
Larkin, that their presence here is necessary, unavoidable, meaningful, and
even salvific: